Too many Kickstarter projects? Is Kickstarter the new d20 glut?

One recent trend which has been growing in popularity to the point of a veritable deluge is the Kickstarter project. Hardly a day goes by without hearing about a new Kickstarter in our little niche industry - and that's only counting the ones I notice. There are undoubtedly countless more.

To put it into a bit of perspective, EN World has reported on 24 Kickstarter projects so far in July, and since we started reporting them in anything other than an occasional capacity, we've had a similar number every month. 22 in June, 27 in May, 25 in April; that's nearly a hundred of them, or an average of a new one every day excluding weekends - so many that I span off a separate site for them all (although they feed over to EN World's news automatically). They are, by far, the most common type of news item that has appeared on EN World in recent months: and this shows that many projects and products which would have normally been reported as more traditional projects are now being reported as Kickstarters.

It's almost like it's the "go-to" default publishing method for small press now, and isn't exactly unheard of in much larger companies. And, one assumes, it lowers the barrier for entry into the industry while simultaneously removing any level of risk.

Of course, I've used the system myself. In fact, I'm not embarrassed to use this topic as an opportunity to promote TO SLAY A DRAGON, my own Kickstarter for an old-style adventure.

So nearly 100 items in three months seemed to be a good landmark to ask: is this too many? Is it yet reaching the point where you see the title and think "Oh, not another Kickstarter...."? Or is that spirit of opportunity and entrepreneurism still appealing? And is there a point at which our little industry is going to be "tapped out" - where people will just be unwilling to donate to more projects? After all, it's not like we have the wide market of, say, iPhone accessories or video games.

It'd be interesting to hear your thoughts on the number of Kickstarter projects being launched at present, so please do feel free to post a response below.

Sure, it's all the rage now, but I expect it'll settle down into something a bit more sustainable. At least, I hope so. Personally, I've only pledged (and donated) to one Kickstarter project and I view most others with a skeptical eye. But if everybody wants to play junior venture capitalist and support projects they'd like to see hit the market, more power to them.

Bill D

"There's a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition."
- Doctor Impossible

Well, considering the Kaidan Campaign Kickstarter is my first venture using Kickstarter itself - it's not the first time I've worked with a patronage system for publishing Kaidan material. Like Open Design Project, Rite Publisihing has it's own in-house patronage system, which is how the original Curse of the Golden Spear trilogy for Kaidan was funded. It's only because we really need fairly 'big bucks' to fund the campaign setting that we chose to go with the 800# patronage system - Kickstarter, who has a larger footprint among the patronage systems and more potential patrons.

All the Kaidan supplemental publications were funded in-house without a patronage. Thus Kickstarter shouldn't be the only method of RPG funding.

Really with all the bigger parts of Kaidan, funding has always via patronage - granted, I've only been trying to publish RPG materials over the last 2 years.

Here's the question that really comes to mind: How many of the kickstarter projects actually end with good product? Or even a product at all?

Right now, there's a ton people saying, "If you give me money, I'll do X!" Unfortunately, I expect many of them to fail to deliver X. And that will quickly begin to sour people's taste for Kickstarter.

Here's the question that really comes to mind: How many of the kickstarter projects actually end with good product? Or even a product at all?

Right now, there's a ton people saying, "If you give me money, I'll do X!" Unfortunately, I expect many of them to fail to deliver X. And that will quickly begin to sour people's taste for Kickstarter.

I've seen articles about this recently in the mainstream press (not specifically about our little corner, of course, but about Kickstarters as a whole). I'll see if I can dig a couple up.

I suspect we'll continue to see a lot of KS projects. I think in particular the success of RA and Traveller really made some jaws drop. I personally have no issue with whomever posting a project, I think a little caveat emptor will kick in and folks will be leery of whom they support. My main issue is that some of them seem to have rather high pledge numbers: a couple of shorter softcover books and a map or two shouldn't need a $100+ kickstarter pledge. As far as covering them here, I think that can actually help with the vetting process.